“Global Babying” and Why It’s Good to Feel Humiliated

In light of the fact that Hawaii’s Little League juggernaut, Waipio, just put a whooping on Pearland Texas (the mercy rule kicked in after Hawaii was up 10-0 in the 5th inning with a no-hitter to boot!), thought my son’s recent post on “sportsmanship” in Japan would provide an interesting cross-cultural perspective on the different ways we perceive the meanings of words. Note that my son is bilingual/bi-cultural, lives in Japan, and played college (American) football for four years at Japan’s Teikyo University. I find his insights fascinating. (Oya Baka for sure!) Enjoy 🙂

By Ry Sullivan

“Global Babying” is a phenomenon that is infecting our world. From the time we are born, we are subjected to all kinds of hardships and challenges. In school we encounter bullying, tough teachers and the occasional pants soiling. On many occasions the phrase “Life isn’t fair” is pounded into our brains to the point where we are resigned to the fact that we can only keep moving forward when something unjust happens to us. This is a good thing…Read the rest of this post>>

Ditto to Grif’s comment. Nice work, Dad-san, and really first-rate post, Ry. Having just spent much of the morning taking a glorious swim in the town pool and listening to parents and their ridiculous comments to their precious little coddled treasures, this was such timely reading. What’s great to see is how this blows the US stereotype of Japan out of the ballpark and flips it (any ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm” fans will appreciate this), since I agree, the real wuss factor is on display right here. These global baby enablers are the very ones who are also monitoring their kids’ Facebook pages and intercepting their email, which is in my mind one of the worst parental offenses around. As an aside, I’d love to hear from some Chinese friends out there, since, interestingly and ironically, I think the global spoiling factor is even worse there than in the US, at least for boys. Time to send the post to my two slugs — I mean ‘doubles’.

Thank you for the praise! I was just really frustrated with authority figures and groups trying to protect the youth. In Japan, house moms [protect] their kids by letting them become video-game playing, free-loading hermits. I guess every society has a different way of protecting somebody and people fail to realize the repercussions are much worse than a skinned knee…

@Sue: thanks for the kind words. So you’ve got 2 “doubles”, eh? (er, slugs? I call mine “mutts”. “Hybrid” works too! LOL.) Hey, just getting into Curb Your Enthusiasm. It takes awhile to get used to shows without a laugh track, but once you’re hooked there’s no going back. I love the quirky humor! As for China, I’d be interested to hear what’s going on there, too.

@Andy: long time no correspond, my friend! Hope all is well and that you’re staying busy. (At least staying out of trouble! :-))

The reason I’ve been posting so much these last few days is that I’ve had a very brief lull in business activities…right before the proverbial “storm” hits: I’m gearing up for a monster project that’ll keep me busy everyday through mid-November. (Translation: I’ll likely go through another “dry period” of posting.) But I promise I’ll do my best to sneak in a post here and there.

Trying to stay out of trouble but I guess it is difficult for a troublemaker to stay out of trouble. : )

Funny enough, I’m back in the corporate world for almost a year now. Not much has changed, same incompetencies, same lack of understanding, same waste of resources and worse, same waste of talents. And me I’m just in the middle of ship sinking with the feeling of a deja vue and questionning/assessing on my future (again!) and therefore my next move.

I cannot say, Tim. Life is funny. It is a difficult task to build a strategy for yourself, try to learn the errors to amend your strategy but it seems the only thing to do if you want to be your own master and as much as possible an independent person…

Anyway, except that things are fine. I’m reading a quite interesting book at the moment “Independent people” by Halldor Laxness.